sustain
Scant time for any kind of thought pieces on here this year. I offer this post as a snapshot of my thoughts on sustainability - a running theme for me of late.
Problem Statement/ Few organisations have managed to create sustainable work environments. Modern industry has largely failed to create sustainable processes.
Thesis/ Corporate models need to be re-invented because people do their best work in sustained group environments. This is true in all co-operative forms of expression (e.g. in most forms of design and engineering). Sustainable industrial processes are key to ecological sustainability and the health of the biosphere.
Myopia/ The 20th Century as a catalogue of short-sightedness. Industry rewards myopia as 'success'.
Percolation/ Sustainability is a timeless design challenge. Its largely unattended problems penetrate all of social life, from the individual through to the corporation and the body politic.
Capital/ Long-term profitability comes from sustainable development. Historically, only 1 in 10 public companies last longer than four decades. [3]
Current/ The notion that market success comes from organisations that hold sustainability as a core principle at all levels, from product design to organisational structure to development processes, is gaining currency.
Child/ The modern corporation, with a history of no more than 150 years or so, is a child in terms of the history of production.
Delight/ Delight as continual learning. No sustainability without some measure of delight.
Diversity/ Diversity as a key ingredient of sustainability. Preservation of diversity in the biosphere as a moral, social, and political goal as well as a commercial one. Preservation of intellectual diversity in a workplace as a purely commercial goal.
Settler/ A sustainable financial, social and intellectual living set-up over a nomadic and erratic one.
Fractal/ Sustainability has a fractal relationship to the Nietzschean notion of 'eternal return' (the ability to live your life as you would wish to live it out an infinite number of times marks the ultimate affirmation of life).
Performance Metric/ Team health. Relative happiness of those expending the effort.
Perspective/ Contrast the modern Perspex industry - dependent on petrochemicals and with a product impossible to recycle without releasing pollutants - to that of Murano Glass - a non-toxic, largely recyclable product that has been produced since 1291.
Growth/ Through the lens of sustainability, Head count in an organisation is not a valid marker for success.
HR/ Modelling people on resources is bad design. People are too complex to be modelled on any contemporary metaphor.
Fossilization/ Vertical power structures fossilize products.
Happiness/ Sustainability as a key ingredient of happiness. We want to be involved in activities that are fundamentally sustainable, because we can then afford to engage in them fully.
Cultivation/ People embrace sustainable forms of product development because everything it implies on a human level - a serious cultivation of teams, retention of people, corporate independence, building products people have a personal investment in - is desirable to the individual. This observation is in sharp contrast to the nomadic form of professional working that has become popular in the western world.
Rhythm/ Keeping motivated as a team over a period of not just months, but years. Preserving momentum.
Consultants/ Companies are unable to cultivate specialized knowledge in all their interest areas since they are not modelled on self-organizing, adaptive organisms. Cue the age of consultants.
Abundance/ What industry calls 'innovation' is creative abundance. How to sustain creative abundance whilst meeting short-term needs (i.e. not going bust).
Democracy/ Democracy itself is a sustainable (political) process. Its principles can therefore be used as building blocks to other sustainable (commercial) processes.
Specialization/ Mechanisms by which specialized knowledge can be spread across organisations without people needing to leave: meet-ups & co-working locations. A consultant eco-system is ultimately problematic for product, departmental & organisational development.
Catalysis/ A horizontal structure hybridized with vertical paths of responsibility elected and erected on-demand. Encourage natural catalysis, intervention.
Co-operation/ Distributed ownership of an organisation feeds accepted responsibility.
Cycle/ Cycles are natural rhythms. Intelligence is a function of feedback bandwidth and quality. Sustainable development as an iterative cycle.
Command/ Companies continue to be based on military-inspired structural models. Tyranny over democracy. Command/divide (and conquer) is still the primary metaphor for conduct. It's an uncompetitive model for a free market.
Atomization of intellect/ An explosion in freelance working has been brought about by the problem statement.
Adaptivity/ How to create a team and process with the capacity to consistently develop not just one great product, but any great product in a given field or even multiple fields.
Self-Organization/ The people that compose a company should be able to shape their organisation's structure, with built-in review processes.
Retention/ Sustainable systems absorb nutrients and release others to nourish wider cycles that are indirectly beneficial to both the system and other co-dependant systems.
Autonomy/ Building a framework of services and tools that allow any new project in an organisation to get off the ground quickly.
Flourish/ Success as an execution of the model abiding by the principles of sustenance. A company as an adaptive organism that doesn't just survive but flourishes.
Accepted Responsibility/ "No single action takes the life out of people more than being told what to do." [4]
Nutrients
[1] Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough & Michael Braungart, North Point Press
[2] The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken, Collins
[3] Leading By Omission, Ricardo Semler, MIT School of Engineering Talks
[4] Extreme Programming Explained, Second Edition (accepted responsibility), Kent Beck with Cynthia Andres, Addison-Wesley
[5] Scrum Et Al (iterative development), Ken Schwaber (Google Talks)
[6] Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham, Portfolio Hardcover
[7] Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee W. Hock, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
[8] A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, Manuel De Landa, Zone Books
[9] Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener, The MIT Press
tags: Business, Development, Software
